Fifty Is Not a Four-Letter Word (20 page)

I was grateful for Vanessa’s matter-of-fact tone. Too much sympathy and I’d start blubbing uncontrollably.

“You know it’s me who’s created this disaster. It’s my fault entirely.”

“Not for me to judge. But according to Olly, you’ve had a lot on your plate to deal with this year.”

“Olly said that? He said I had a lot on my plate?”

“He didn’t use those exact words, more like that you had a lot of shit to wade through, something like that. But whatever
words he used, it boils down to the same thing.”

“But he never seems to notice anything. Teenagers are so much the center of their own universe.”

“Of course he notices. He’s clever, like you, and he’s got feelings, like the rest of us. And you’re his mum, after all, so
naturally, he picks up when you’re not yourself. Your problem is . . .”

“Is what?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not up to me, you’re the one who needs to work out what your problem is. But talking can
help. And as your husband has just walked out on you, you might want to start by talking about him.”

“I just want him back.”

“Do you know
why
you want him back?”

“Because we’ve been together twenty years and we’re a family and I can’t cope without him. And because I’m falling to pieces.”

“Mmm, I think you can do better than that.”

You’re going to start at the beginning and spill the beans
, Vanessa had said to me when she accosted me on the pavement. If I was going to do this at all, I should really be doing
it with Maddy, or Sarah, or Claire, if only she were in the country. That would have made sense. Sitting in this car-boot
sale of a kitchen with Vanessa the Undresser, Vanessa the Vamp, Vanessa the Tramp, Vanessa the Seducer of Innocent Boys, made
no sense at all. And yet sitting at Vanessa’s kitchen table, my hands wrapped around a chipped Thomas the Tank Engine mug,
I felt momentarily safe. I believed Vanessa when she said she wouldn’t judge me or force her opinions down my throat. And
I wasn’t sure Sarah or Maddy would be able to do the same. Sometimes your sister and your best friend are too close to you,
too enmeshed, too involved with the minutiae of your life, to be able to offer objective advice. They think they know everything
about you, and they think they know what’s good for you. And they don’t hold back from telling you. There was always the possibility
that Vanessa had an ulterior motive: I couldn’t be sure my son’s lover didn’t want ammunition in what had escalated into a
war between us. But I didn’t think so. And now that peace seemed to have broken out, Vanessa seemed prepared, eager, even,
to listen to the ramblings of a foolish fifty-year-old who should know better. But where do you start, how do you begin to
describe a marriage of almost twenty years? I figured starting at the beginning might not be an altogether bad idea.

• • •

Venice 1983. The weekend I met Maddy for the first time, on the flight over to Venice, I was staying at the swish Bauer Hotel,
a pigeon’s skip from St. Mark’s Square. My arduous assignment for
Sapphire,
the magazine where I was deputy editor at the time, was to soak up the atmosphere, take in the sights, check out some Venetian
shops and restaurants, and write a thousand words of copy. In other words, it was a dream assignment.

You couldn’t get more motley than me and my fellow journalists on the press trip. There was an obnoxious and drunken crime
reporter from a tabloid newspaper who had stepped in for the travel editor at the last moment and refused to shift from the
bar except for meals and sleep. A rather grand fiftysomething freelance travel writer for a broadsheet who complained nonstop
to the PR girl assigned to nanny us about the hotel service, the thread count of her sheets, and the intermittently pungent
odors drifting up from the canal, as if the poor PR girl were personally to blame for Venice’s sometimes disturbing aroma.
Finally, there was the photographer who’d come to take pictures of Venetian prostitutes for a Sunday supplement, and who disappeared
the moment we arrived and reappeared only for the water taxi back to the airport, behaving enigmatically and refusing to share
his experiences.

I pitied the hapless Clarissa, the way-beyond-her-depth PR girl acting on behalf of the luxury hotel marketing group that
was financing our stay. Between warding off the lunges of the inebriated hack and fielding the broadsides of the broadsheet
travel writer, Clarissa was mostly in tears. I know it wasn’t exactly supportive of me, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of
spending mealtimes with the groping crime reporter and the evil harpy, she who had been everywhere and appreciated nothing.
So I made my excuses to the much put-upon Clarissa about how I needed to strike out on my own for the story, and I left her
to manage as best she could.

I was having the loveliest time. I had risen, uncharacteristically, at six a.m. to explore the city, shrouded in early-morning
mist, and stepped right into a Turner painting. With hardly another person around, the narrow canals that lace Venice, with
its weather-worn residences in all shades of ocher, rust, pink, and terra cotta and strung across with washing lines, looked
as they would have centuries before. I listened to the music of the gently rippling water lapping against the candy-striped
pylons that stand sentry outside faded palazzi, and I enjoyed a far more melodious serenade than that of the singing gondoliers
who’d soon be fleecing their willing victims in the theme-park atmosphere of daytime Venice. I’d sneaked into a service at
the synagogue in the ghetto, not for spiritual sustenance but to imbibe the atmosphere of the world’s oldest Jewish quarter,
which had remained almost unchanged for five hundred years. And I had returned twice to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco to
see Tintoretto’s emotional depictions of scenes from both the Old and New Testaments. I’d taken the vaporetto out to the Lido
and wandered barefoot along the empty beach, past the Hotel des Bains, where the mournfully beautiful
Death in Venice
was filmed over a decade earlier. It was late October, and although Venice itself was still thronged with tourists, the Lido
had been purged of holidaymakers. Empty seaside towns make most people feel wistful, even a little sad. I like nothing better
than a clear stretch of sand and the sense of everything else around me—people, hotels, restaurants, shops—being sound asleep
for the winter.

I’d returned, on the second night of my stay, from a noisy restaurant in a back street close to the Rialto, where I’d gorged
on Parma ham and melon, followed by
fegato alla veneziana,
meltingly tender calves’ liver sautéed with onions in butter, finishing with a hefty chunk of creamy Taleggio cheese and
a handful of Grissini sticks. A single woman on my own, I’d attracted waiters like a magnet; they’d fallen over themselves
to explain the menu. A glass of wine—compliments of a trio of Italian businessmen at a nearby table—arrived within moments
of my sitting down. I did a lot of gracious smiling, but I refused their offer to join them over a glass of post-prandial
grappa.

I had a little plan of my own for when I got back to the Bauer. I was going to find a good spot on its famous outdoor terrace,
overlooking the Grand Canal, and indulgently order myself a Bellini, that perfectly balanced equation of peach nectar and
sparkling Prosecco, which had, in fact, been invented in Venice.

The Bauer has perhaps the best terrace in the city. On this night an almost-full moon, like a silvery disco ball, lit the
lagoon, sending diamonds skimming across the water. It surprised me how good it felt to be thirty, independent, moderately
successful, and okay—for the moment—about being single. Unlike so many women I knew, I had no sense of being about to pass
my sell-by date, or of my biological clock ticking toward midnight. At thirty, I’d finally hit my stride, although my anxieties,
never more than a wafer-thin layer of skin from the surface, would seep through my pores unbidden, without warning, and in
an instant replace all my certainty with fear.

Not tonight, though. Tonight I felt invincible. Free and happy and hopeful for the future.

I was still basking in the glories of Venice and my success over dinner with the waiters and the businessmen. For once I was
even feeling happy with my appearance. I was going through something of an Audrey Hepburn homage phase, wearing a simple sleeveless
black linen shift dress to the knee, with a red cardigan around my shoulders and flat red ballet pumps. My big sunglasses,
Audrey-style, were perched on top of my head, holding my hair back from my face.

I sipped my cocktail and stretched out a leg.
Hmm
, I thought, with my bordering-on-chunky calves and more than hand-span ankles, I’d never cut quite the elegant figure I aspired
to.

My built-in smugness detector was already highly developed. Whenever I find myself getting pleased with myself—then, as now—I
stop myself short and focus on a fault: in my figure, my personality, my performance at work. It’s a kind of superstitious
habit that has accompanied my tortuous route to confidence. As long as I didn’t start to think I was special, the fates would
be kind to me. I let out a little giggle—very little, or so I thought.

“Must be an excellent joke for you to be laughing there all on your own. Are you in the mood to share it?”

I hadn’t even noticed the man at the next table.

“God, how embarrassing. I must look quite mad. But you’d think I was even madder if I told you what was making me laugh.”

“Try me.”

“No way.”

“I’m prepared to overlook your insanity on this occasion. Would you like another of whatever it is you’re drinking? Unless,
of course, you’re waiting for someone, or if you’ve had enough of the local Lotharios, one of whom I may just turn out to
be.”

And because the moon was so bright, and because it was Venice, and because I wasn’t waiting for anyone, certainly not the
hack or the harpy, I said, “You don’t look especially Lothario-like. And I’d love another Bellini.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

“If you’ve never had a Bellini, you haven’t truly lived. The Bellini is sublime. It was invented here, in Venice, in 1931,
by Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder of the famous Harry’s Bar, which is just around the corner from where we’re sitting. And
it’s made with Prosecco, Italian sparkling wine, mixed with ripe white peach puree. You can make it with champagne, but it
does rather spoil the point of the champagne.”

“Mmm, cocktails are a bit girly for me. I think I’ll stick to lager, but I’d love to buy you a Bellini and watch you drink
it.”

“You’re not girly, then?”

“Well, I get no kick from champagne. And I don’t love to shop. But I have been known to cry at the opera, and people tell
me I’m a decent cook. I was even caught on one occasion washing up afterward. And if it helps to hear this, I think strong
women are very sexy.” His eyes took me in from head to toe and back up again in a single sweep. “Which, when you add it all
up, probably does make me quite a girly sort of bloke, whatever that may mean.”

“Would you like to marry me?” I laughed. “You seem too good to be true.”

“ ‘Can’t take my eyes off you.’ ”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s from an awful Frankie Valli song. When you get to know me better, you’ll discover I’m only as good as someone else’s
lyrics. But it’s true about not being able to take my eyes off of you.”

“Isn’t ‘I get no kick from champagne’ someone else’s lyric, too?”

“Guilty as charged. Now let’s find ourselves a waiter. And by the way, since you asked, I’d be quite happy to marry you.”

“Only quite?”

“Well, let’s not rush things. Let’s have a drink and see how it goes from there.”

While he was waving somewhat ineffectually at passing waiters, I got the chance to look at him. I liked what I saw. His straight,
thick hair was just below jaw-length and fair, kind of streaky blond, parted in a random zigzag fashion on one side. I said
a silent prayer that those highlights were natural, otherwise this could be the start of something very small. I’ve always
had a thing about good-looking guys with long hair, ponytails included; it gives them an androgynous quality I find really
sexy. But highlights would be pushing it. As he ran his fingers through his mane, revealing a tiny silver hoop earring, and
I watched his hair flop forward again as soon as he released it, I felt the hairs on my arms stand to attention. He could
have the benefit of the doubt as far as highlights were concerned. There was still the long, straight nose to consider, the
mouth that stretched right across his face when he smiled, and the pale but bright and mischievous eyes (I couldn’t tell what
color in the glow of the flaming torches surrounding the terrace). He was wearing crumpled linen trousers, sandals with no
socks, and a nondescript T-shirt revealing slim but muscled arms and elegantly long fingers. The overall impression was of
a lean-bodied man, about my age, comfortable in his own skin, and with legs that seemed to stretch out over a fair distance,
although I couldn’t tell how tall he was because he was sitting down.

“You don’t seem very English,” I said as he finally caught the waiter’s attention and ordered our drinks.

“How not very English?”

“There’s a trace of an accent, for a start, and there’s something about the trousers you’re wearing. I really don’t know,
it’s an instinct.”

“Trousers, yeah, a dead giveaway. But your instinct is good.” He smiled directly at me, and a single dimple appeared on his
left cheek. “My name is Jack, the English version of Jacques, which is what my French mother wanted to call me. My father
is English, but he’s a diplomat, which is a far less fancy job than it sounds, so we moved around throughout my childhood.
West Africa, Greece, Egypt. They didn’t want to send me to boarding school, and my mother made it a condition of her marriage
that she could keep her children with her, so my sister and I were educated all over the place—often by private tutors—until
my A levels, when my dad was posted back to England. So I guess I am English, but I’ve never really absorbed Englishness.
Unlike my sister, Anita, who has never thought of herself as anything other than a debutante and would die rather than get
down and dirty with the natives. Me? You could dump me anywhere from Kinshasa to Kentucky, and I’d call it home.”